I when to college for computer networking. Now before I get a job, I want to build my own storage server. I have an old computer to use. For this build I was thinking about what OS should I use. After I googled it, then I found out about "Freenas". Should I use this in my server?

Welcome to Spiceworks. I would start looking for a job, or even look for a company where I wanted to work. Find out what they're using and go in that direction. You'll probably find a lot more Windows shops out there.

There are some storage gurus here that will not agree with this but I run NAS4Free at my house for my NAS. I like it for what it offers. I have script files for maintaining the snapshots based off of my needs. It was FreeNAS but changed names a few years back.

I say yes. And then format the drive and try Windows; and then format again and try Debian; then try Red-hat; etc. etc.

You're learning so go forth and experiment. You won't really learn the pros and cons of each solution because you won't have users, won't be backing it up, etc. BUT you will learn server install on many platforms.

And with some luck, something won't "just-work" and you will have to dig a little deeper to figure it out. All part of learning so embrace it.

FreeNAS is based on BSD, which is not Linux. They may appear to be similar but have very different kernels and thus different drivers and hardware support. They also have different TCP/IP stacks and firewalls, different file systems and much more. I am not going to say that one is better than the other, only that they have different features. Try them both.

As for the OP, if this is for learning, go right ahead. Do not store critical data on this thing because you will screw it up at some point (we all do). I have my career because of my home lab and constantly tinkering with it. In your shoes I would plan on rebuilding this "server" every couple of months. I would also try several different OSs and technologies. ZFS on BSD (or Freenas), btrfs on any Linux distro (XUbuntu/LUbuntu and Fedora are good choices here). Get used to configuring SAMBA. From there look at other file systems (glusterfs and ceph, especially if you can scrounge up more NICs and another PC). Then look at DevStack (Openstack on a single machine).

You can also get free trials for Microsoft "Server". Storage spaces (and the MS implementation of storage tiering) would be good to get hands on experience with.

Keep playing and keep learning. There is no finish line except for the one where you no longer do this stuff.

If you do not enjoy playing in your home lab, then I would re-evaluate your career choice (not trying to be a dick here, but you simply won't be able to compete in the long term with people who legitimately love this stuff).

There are some storage gurus here that will not agree with this but I run NAS4Free at my house for my NAS. I like it for what it offers. I have script files for maintaining the snapshots based off of my needs. It was FreeNAS but changed names a few years back.

Openfiler is the one to avoid. Nas4free is the continuation of the old FreeNAS line, where the current FreeNAS has had significant work done under the hood. I have not looked at either in a while now. The OP should probably try them both :)

For learning about storage technologies and systems, don't worry too much about the underlying filesystem. To a lesser extent, don't even worry too much about the operating system.

FreeNAS is an excellent choice, not only for learning, but also for production networks. Sure, you could roll your own system from scratch and learn a lot about the OS, but if that's not your focus, then go with a ready-to-run appliance.

If you have sketchy hardware, try NAS4Free, which is a little more difficult to get started, but it will work on a hardware that FreeNAS trips over and provide a similar experience.

I think there are some free/open storage server projects based on Linux, but I couldn't name even one.

FreeNAS is great. OwnCloud is also fantastic... gives you sync capabilities similar to Dropbox, only self hosted. Once you get your preferred Linux distro installed, it's a cinch to set up also... basically works right out of the box.

For learning about storage technologies and systems, don't worry too much about the underlying filesystem. To a lesser extent, don't even worry too much about the operating system.

FreeNAS is an excellent choice, not only for learning, but also for production networks. Sure, you could roll your own system from scratch and learn a lot about the OS, but if that's not your focus, then go with a ready-to-run appliance.

If you have sketchy hardware, try NAS4Free, which is a little more difficult to get started, but it will work on a hardware that FreeNAS trips over and provide a similar experience.

I think there are some free/open storage server projects based on Linux, but I couldn't name even one.

Ceph and Swift are the first that come to mind; btrfs +﻿ samba is pretty compelling as well. Scale out solutions as opposed to scale up is where most of the activity is (aka what ZFS sucks at).

Commercially there are a lot of solutions built on top of Linux (Synology, Nutanix, QNAP) so there is value in knowing what is going on under the hood.

To the OP, go as deep as you want to. If you only want to manage something from a GUI without knowing what is happening under the hood, go for it (NAS4 Free and FreeNAS are great in this role). If you are looking to grow your expertise (which IMO is never a bad idea assuming you actually love this stuff) play around with as much as you can.

Openfiler is the one to avoid. Nas4free is the continuation of the old FreeNAS line, where the current FreeNAS has had significant work done under the hood.

OpenFiler is the worst possible option, of course, but the entire category should be avoided. FreeNAS and NAS4Free should never come up as options. Not good for learning, certainly not good for business.

I when to college for computer networking. Now before I get a job, I want to build my own storage server. I have an old computer to use. For this build I was thinking about what OS should I use. After I googled it, then I found out about "Freenas". Should I use this in my server?

Definitely not. Use an enterprise OS like a business would. FreeNAS is really only for hobbyists and relegates you to a community of people who do not understand storage. It's a self-creating problem .... make a product only for people who don't know storage, attract those people, those people give bad advice to each other, the cycle continues. Avoid everything have to do with "NAS OS" communities, they are self defeating.

I am assuming, of course, that your goal is to get experience, learn and to build a resume. If your goal is hobby-class home storage for you to use, not for you to learn IT that would apply to work, then by all means things like FreeNAS would not be my recommendation but the reasons to be wary are business and IT ones, not things that would apply to home or hobby use.

I say yes. And then format the drive and try Windows; and then format again and try Debian; then try Red-hat; etc. etc....

Can play with webmin, cpanel, plesk (free), and so on. Expect them to break, and put some effort into keeping them going. Learning experience and all that. Yet, they are expendable. Even with an old box, added RAM and a SSD can make the practicing more pleasant.﻿

Openfiler is the one to avoid. Nas4free is the continuation of the old FreeNAS line, where the current FreeNAS has had significant work done under the hood.

OpenFiler is the worst possible option, of course, but the entire category should be avoided. FreeNAS and NAS4Free should never come up as options. Not good for learning, certainly not good for business.

This makes a lot of sense, I did not really think through the consequences of using NAS4Free and FreeNAS (I am sure you get this a lot, but great article). I have not used these NAS-OS variants because I was already familiar with OpenBSD and Linux to work at the native OS level. I wish I could say this was more of a conscious choice on my part and not merely due to chance (the right people making the right suggestions at the right time in my life and career).

Scott Alan Miller wrote: I would not agree here. It is not good enough even for free. All of its competition is also free, but better. That actually makes it pretty awful, even being free.

We all know you are afraid of iSCSI SANs and think they are unnecessarily complex but by your Jurassic Park logic we all need to go off and write our own operating systems. You might be right in most cases, even on all fronts but FreeNAS (and by extension TrueNAS) has changed the landscape. Fundamentally you may be right but there is no denying FreeNAS delivers a system of many capabilities that used to have a very high cost of entry for "Free". Besides, the animals are genetically modified so they can't reproduce so there is no danger :)

Scott Alan Miller wrote: I would not agree here. It is not good enough even for free. All of its competition is also free, but better. That actually makes it pretty awful, even being free.

We all know you are afraid of iSCSI SANs and think they are unnecessarily complex but by your Jurassic Park logic we all need to go off and write our own operating systems. You might be right in most cases, even on all fronts but FreeNAS (and by extension TrueNAS) has changed the landscape. Fundamentally you may be right but there is no denying FreeNAS delivers a system of many capabilities that used to have a very high cost of entry for "Free". Besides, the animals are genetically modified so they can't reproduce so there is no danger :)

This has nothing to do with iSCSI. All he is saying is that the technology available in these FreeNAS et al. is also available in the original OS that these "products" are based on. Since the original OSs are also free (both in cost and in licencing), there is no advantage to FreeNAS and friends. All that happens is that the people installing these things are allowed to remain ignorant of what is happening under the hood which means they won't be able to fix things when it breaks.

I am not saying (and I don't thing Scott is either) that you should have to always roll your own solution, only that you should actually buy a product (Synology, Exabloks, Nutanix, Netapp etc.) when it makes sense, and if you want a free or libre solution, then go straight to the source (so FreeBSD or OpenBSD for ZFS, Linux for BTRFS/Ceph/Swift/HDFS/Gluster/gluster-rdma/crazy-awesome-thing-of-today) and avoid these solutions which try to straddle both worlds.

Would you also recommend starting with a kernel and building your own OS? How about a firewall? Would you snub your nose at pfSense, Untangle or IPcop?

There's nothing inherently wrong with FreeNAS or other projects or the filesystems they use under the hood. Do you know or care what OS/FS Dell uses on their EqualLogic? Do you really care that Synology and QNap use Linux? What about a $100k box from IXsystems? Would it bother you that it's running TrueNAS, the closed source version of FreeNAS?

Now, while I would use FreeNAS for myself on my own networks, I would not use it on a customer or employer network. What happens in 2 years when I'm not around and they need help?

When it comes to learning how to work with a SAN, what does it matter if the iSCSI target is a $100k box from Dell, a $1k box from Synology, or an old server running FreeNAS for $0? If the goal is to learn NAS/SAN, then the backend doesn't really make a whit of difference.

If you're applying for a job to manage a VMware cluster with a Dell EqualLogic SAN, does experience with Synology or Qnap help you at all? Do they help you more than FreeNAS woudl help you?

Maybe you're right though. The OP should drop $50k on a used EqualLogic if he wants to learn how a storage systems work.

Scott Alan Miller wrote: I would not agree here. It is not good enough even for free. All of its competition is also free, but better. That actually makes it pretty awful, even being free.

We all know you are afraid of iSCSI SANs and think they are unnecessarily complex but by your Jurassic Park logic we all need to go off and write our own operating systems. You might be right in most cases, even on all fronts but FreeNAS (and by extension TrueNAS) has changed the landscape. Fundamentally you may be right but there is no denying FreeNAS delivers a system of many capabilities that used to have a very high cost of entry for "Free". Besides, the animals are genetically modified so they can't reproduce so there is no danger :)

That comment was about FreeNAS vs. FreeBSD or Linux for the SAN OS. It about making the SAN better, not having no SAN at all. This is about learning, I think, so having a SAN might be perfect. But using a sensible system that is worth learning is the first step to it being valuable.

FreeNAS hasn't changed the landscape. Other than OpenFiler, this is the worst way to try to make a SAN (and OF doesn't even work.) Other than making SANs riskier that if it didn't exist, what value has FreeNAS brought? Did you read the article to understand why I'm saying this?

@troy If the objective is to learn, then yes I would look down on pfsense, ipcop, and to a lesser extent OpenWRT (I actually make pretty heavy use of OpenWRT on x86). Scott is also not recommending a $50,000 solution, and neither am I. OpenBSD is every bit as "free" as PFSense, and under the hood they are both using pf (though there are worlds of difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD and even more with a Linux solution). IPCop is Linux based, but you will learn zero about IPTables and TC from it.

If you want to learn, do it yourself following a guide such as lartc.org. There are no shortcuts to knowledge and skills, only hard work and persistance. If you don't want to put in the effort then fine, do so at your own risk. Personally I would rather buy a SYnology then rely on FreeNAS/TrueNAS/etc. In fact I do own a Synology for the data I care about (along with offsite backups). Having pulled 8 disks out of a dead Synology in the past, I put them in a pc and used mdadm to rebuild the array and mount the ext3/4 file system to get at the data. Knowing how it works gives me confidance in the product. When bad things happen I can either help myself or find someone to help me. I am not about to ask the local OpenBSD guys since I know that this is a Linux based product. I can also ask vendors intelligent questions to make sure that ther product is a good fit with our business objectives when I am at work.

I am not saying that you always need to have this level of thouroughness, and one person cannot know everything. Having said that the tools are there if you want to learn and grow your skillset. Just don't kid yourself that FreeNAS, PFsense, or anything similar is going to teach you anything of substance.

It's also important to note that a firewall is not like storage. Your firewall goes up in flames or can't be fixed, you just replace it. You don't lose data when things go wrong.

Storage is the more fragile, more critical thing we do in IT. Having a storage system that you can't support could result (and often does) in data loss or extended loss of operations. Storage is the most extreme aspect of IT "risk". It needs to be thought about carefully and not treated casually.